But can you run ASP on a linux box? because if not then its not free… If you set up a windows server you have to pay for a windows licence, where as you don’t with Linux… ASP of course itself is free, but this is one of the main reasons why PHP took off is the fact that linux dosnt need a licence.

But not as much as people think and no developer or designer host ur website on your own pc . they go for hosting companies and Hosting plans of linux and windows has not much difference. and c# is a superior language than PHP.

But not as much as people think and no developer or designer host ur website on your own pc . they go for hosting companies and Hosting plans of linux and windows has not much difference. and c# is a superior language than PHP.

But not as much as people think and no developer or designer host ur website on your own pc . they go for hosting companies and Hosting plans of linux and windows has not much difference.

But if PHP is as powerful (some may even argue more so – im not too sure about that) why pay for a server that needs more physical hardware to run as good as a linux one would… its just not good scense… if you get 2 same spec servers, put linux on one and Windows on another the linux would run circles around it and support easyer file permission management, its free software that supports free databasing and scripting languages.

You would be crazy to try and maintain a windows 2000/2003 server in comparison to something like CentOS.

I am not particularly a linux fan, I am a windows user – and was a windows IT support guy for most of my professional life – but the facts are that linux is a more cost effective, efficiant and more reliable option.

As for C# I dunno. If you want to make 360 games or other things like that, thats great… Im a web dude – so I want to use the tools best suited to what I do – PHP/XHTML/CSS/MySQL/Javascript all work above and beyond what I could ever dream of, or accomplish.

"ikthius" wrote:

c# is just the same as java though

It is? I never knew that…

It seems the more I get into the languages side, once you have an understanding of scripting for example, it dosnt take much to shift your skills across languages. For example learning jQuery has really helped me learn PHP quicker.

The problem here is your definition of free. ASP.NET is free in the sense of Buy one, get one free. But it’s not free in the sense of Free beer – whoohoo! Reminds me of a sketch I saw on TV of a guy in a convenience store opening a bunch of packets and eating one item. When asked what he was doing he said "I’m only taking the free ones!"

As far as real world hosting goes ASP.NET is only free if you buy a Windows Server product. In the same way SQL Server Express is free, but it has a 1 CPU, 1GB memory limitation. Big shared hosting providers usually use Quad CPU 8Gb+ machines which Express edition fails to make use of, so they need to buy Standard or Enterprise. And because you are using it for web development this means purchasing a per CPU license which can be astronomical.

The same is true of the development tools. Firstly, you can develop ASP.NET applications in Notepad if you want to. Or gEdit or Coda or whatever. For sure, this is free. But would you want to? I doubt it.

The problem with ASP.NET is that in order to get anything useful done you pretty much need the development GUI. I have to admit Visual Web Developer is a great product and probably one of the best IDEs available. Again it’s only free if you buy Windows – not exactly friendly to the web design & development community that largely use Macs.

But to develop in PHP I don’t need a fancy IDE. Sure PHP doesn’t do a whole bunch of stuff that ASP.NET does – I wish PHP came with something like ASP.NETs GridView for example. But PHP makes up for it with the wealth of already existing, free, open source software such as WordPress, phpBB, osCommerce, MediaWiki, etc…

I don’t wish to put anyone off ASP.NET I think it’s a great technology (even though it is proprietory). I don’t think it will ever take off in mainstream web development however, it’s more of a niche thing.

TLDR? Short version…
When i’m developing a line-of-business application for use on a company intranet (and that company is a Microsoft shop) I’m usually using ASP.NET.
When I’m developing for the internet I develop in PHP.

I too use php more than Asp.net but ASp.net is good too in some areas.

But yes ASP.net is not as free as PHP. But it’s a plus point for .NET developer he can switch over web development to Desktop, Game, and mobile with little effort when needed. because C# can do all these.

yeah your right, c# is not java, but microsoft got so worried about the java bandwaggon a while ago, that they decided to make their own jre, then a big fight went on, and sun finally won in that only sun JVM should be used to interperate the code…..including the browsers JVM

windows saw the potential loss of everything running on windows, cause lets say a langauge you can use across any system was a great idea, so windows developed c# similar to C but so much more similar to java.

in fact if I remember correctly, the class declarations, access declarations and all of that is exactly the same as java.

ok what makes it different is the name of some methods/classes, but windows made a language to mimic java so well to try and lure people away from java.

but for me, I will stick to what i know, java (all be it a while ago), (X)HTML, CSS, a bit of PHP & JavaScript.

I want truly free, not something you have to buy first then getting something free with it.

Thanks for the info on Mono – I had heard of them but last time I looked it wasn’t fully compatible (only 50% or so). It really looks like they have come a long way since then.

And you are right about C# being different to Java. IIRC Microsoft tried to add some Windows-specific bits to Java (which is owned by Sun Microsystems). Sun didn’t like this, as it removes the write once run anywhere aspect from Java, so sued Microsoft. That’s why Microsoft created C# which is kind of inspired by Java but different enough that Sun couldn’t sue them.

Ironically Java is now GPL open source which means anyone can do anything they like with it without getting sued.

But I worry about LINQ to SQL being killed off possibly – see http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/10/ … o-sql.aspx . This can’t happen in an open source project like PHP. Eg. Suppose PHP decided to stop supporting MySQL. The community can take the existing MySQL source code from PHP and compile it into a plugin. Not the same with ASP.NET since it is proprietary and we will never see the source code.

[list=2]It’s free (as in beer)[/list:o]
[list=3]It’s free (as in freedom; I can modify the interpreter source code all I want and nobody will care. I can re-release my version of it too.)[/list:o]
[list=4]There are more prepared solutions written in PHP than for ASP.NET[/list:o]
[list=5]You can not run ASP.NET on Linux without Novell’s dirty, reverse engineered version of ASP.NET that, from experience, it not mature, nor stable (IMHO)[/list:o]
[list=6]True ASP.NET requires IIS on Windows. I’m an IT administrator by day and superhero Mann Katze by night. It may be because I’ve used Unix/Linux for most of my career, but Linux can be much easier to administrate than Windows. Apache is much more configurable, expandable, und cost effective für mein company than IIS is, not to mention safer when kept up with updates, which brings us back to Linux. We use Debian as our server OS, which keeps our vital server applications safe from intruders (crackers) because of the powerful Debian Package Management System. Apache security updates are installed within an hour of them being available, without the need of an Administrator present. Finally, since Apache is open source, more people are viewing the source and fixing bugs than a company versus their users.[/list:o]

Those are my reasons for using PHP, with Apache and Linux (LAMP). Glückwünsche for learning a language though :)

I’ve chosen to go with PHP as a freelancer because of the ease in developing with it, but I used to work at HP as a software developer so I can tell you from experience and from what I can see from looking at high tech job boards such as dice.com, most larger companies go with something like Java (J2EE) or ASP.net. If you want a higher paying job with a larger company, then ASP.net and C# seems to be the way to go. It definitely can’t hurt having it on your resume!

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